Advice for reluctant but listening son to improve college performance

My son is a Junior in college. Good son, lots of volunteer work, an RA. I feel he wastes time by easily becoming distracted with the texting or computer networking, but perhaps there is more.

He is at a good competitive university. In the scale of 4 he is at about 3.3 average. He feels bad about his grades and overall college performance and is quite stressed.

His aim was on becoming a medical doctor, which would still be his preference.

He finds difficult to analyze, taking exams where he gets good grades and now is losing all direction on what to become and what and how best to study.

A difficult term is about to start with difficult courses has him thinking that there is a very little chance to get into medical school. So he comes to me, dad, for recommendation on what to do

As a parent I want to lead him to find the solution. I don't have it. Is it a visit to a psychologist? Learn better study habits and time management skills? Advise him to pursue other fields? Maybe he just does not have the analytical mind to get there. Can he improve it? Is it that the distractions can be the core of it all? How can he with time constraints he has, still improve time management skills?

What would be my first step to give him good advice?

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Time management is something we all have to do. It’s just a question of how well we do it in relation to what we decide to do on a daily basis.

Your son manages his time. He makes choices about what to do (or what not to do). The problem arises when the choices he makes don’t align with what really matters to him.

From what you say, it sounds as if he has lost a degree of motivation for what he is doing.

This is to be expected in any field. No one is passionate about what they are doing all the time, particularly when it’s future related and confidence issues arise.

Perhaps the key is to adjust the way he works. Adopting a little and often approach can re-ignite motivation. By that I mean committing to taking action every single working day. If he wants to know how to achieve goals this is a powerful and effective method that works.

Nothing worthwhile is ever easy to achieve...